Visualisation Matters: Putting the human in the loop

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Monthly Archives: April 2017

My kind of desk – pre-work within Research IT office, for a touchtable and projection display stand at the University of Manchester Regius Professorship award celebration.

Using the new Acer Predator (17 G9-792) laptop, with an inbuilt great graphics card (NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 970M with 6GB GDDR5 Dedicated Memory), and touchscreen – bits borrowed from UoM and STFC visualisation groups along with (STFC www.CCPi.ac.uk) tomography data and the drishti-prayog volume visualisation software all appear to run extremely sweet.Moving this to the exhibition area within the NGI (National Graphine Institute) with a HDMI splitter should then be suitable for 100’s of viewers per hour …

Show setup for 150+ special visitors. This example on the screen (one of about 15), just prepared, showed work from by the new EPSRC Flagship CCPi fellowship, Daniil Kazantsev et al from RAL that using multiple volume vis transfer functions highlighted the centre and the fractal edge of slices showing dendritic behaviour (even measurable).

The laptop and small workstation were hidden and all you see is the touchtable, controlled by the operator or user on the right, and the main screen allowing multiple people to view and comment at once.

The volume visualisation was a little tricky as the raw data had been pre-segmented already so I had to create a boundary edge by interpolation and reducing the size of the complete object.

There was a talk by Regius Phil Withers after a presentation of the award from the Queen’s representative, as well as a question and answer session chaired by the President of the University of Manchester.

Back in the Computer Lab., at the University of Cambridge in about 1992 there were at least two filter coffee systems; both running on a slow drip-filter setup. The Rainbow Group had access to one machine in a walk down a corridor to a small kitchenette; but the network team had to travel a lot longer way to their coffee machine. A problem of lack of enthusiasm to travel meant that often they would find an empty coffee pot – or even worse stale coffee. A solution was a camera video stream that linked to the linux server and stream images to X Windows. So when new fresh coffee arrived this would be obvious from the image on everyone’s desktop.

http://64bits.co.uk/ have been rebuilding old systems and in East London they rebuild the Cambridge Coffee pot scenario – with similar equipment. There is a wikipedia page on the original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ATrojan_Room_coffee_pot

Is video streaming – visualisation – well definitely yes as it is an interpretation. Due to low quality network speed and CPUs; the small 128×128 video stream of images had to just include the coffee level and also the fps was about one frame every few seconds – but that is a good rate and good enough resolution for “coffee pot observation”.